Julia-+How+are...?

** My students do not identify as powerful. They are young and are at the mercy of those older than them. They are children and are at the mercy of their parents. They are students and are at the mercy of their teachers. They are minorities and are at the mercy of their government, a government that does not look like them or sound like them. I firmly believe that academic literacy is power. I want to give my students the tools they need to be able to identify as powerful, whether it is in their own communities, or just their own lives. In my setting, at a private school, it is socially acceptable to be smart and to care about school. I have a head start in that. But my students come from many backgrounds, many neighborhoods and many cultures. There are advantages and disadvantages related to academic literacy that stem from their backgrounds. I need to teach them to harness their Discourse. I teach controversy in the context of literature. In the novels, plays and autobiographies my students read, they clearly make the connections between social identity and power. We read __Othello__ and see how someone outside of the powerful group is treated. My challenge is to have my class full of young women, black, Hispanic and Asian, relate to this play. They do. They do because of academic literacy. Because this play is within their reach as students and my expectations are both realistic and high. I expect them to make those connections. Then we read the life of Frederick Douglass. He draws a clear line between power and academic literacy. He learned to read and became free. They are the same to him. Furthermore, he learned to read against the orders of those in power. He took power from them by becoming academically literate. What a lesson, what a model for my students to take with them. My students live their own lives and make their own connections between these three, but it is a major theme of my course that I try to impart with every lesson. Each student starts by knowing who she is. She places herself within the context of her friends, her school, her neighborhood, her city, her ethnicity. She needs to know what she thinks of power. She needs to decide how she will wield her own power and how she will go about empowering herself. I need to prove to her that academic literacy is a path to power. I believe the connections between social identity, power and academic literacy are clear but not limiting. These three are connected and can be used in conjunction with each other. They exist on spectrums, not in absolutes.
 * How are social identity, power and academic literacy related?